High Latency when playing World of Warcraft

[bpatters69]

Hello folks,

I have been playing WoW since last July and I have not had too many problems with latency, however; in the past two to three weeks the latency has been so bad that I cannot play the game. For those of you who play the game, you know there is a status bar which is green for good latency and red for bad latency. The symptoms are always the same. I start off with latency below 200 and over about 10 to 20 minutes the latency climbs until it is well into the thousands, ie 3,000, 4,000, etc. It has gone as high as 9000 and then disconnected.

I can't be positive but it seems like when I go into battlegrounds or I am in an instance with several other players it tends to get worse. I can shut the game down and wait 5 or 10 minutes and then start it back up with the same result. I have tried WoW technical support and they told me to update my video and sound card drivers. Yawn.

The specs on the PC that I am using are:

P4 3Ghz with over 1GB of Ram
64MB ATI Radeon 9000 Video Card
Windows XP
Dell Notebook
McAfee Firewall
Netfear Router with firewall

I have opened all the ports on both the Netgear via port forwarding and also on the McAfee firewall. I have set the pc up in a DMZ so that I bypass the Netgear router. I also have the PC set up with a static IP so that the Netgear knows what IP address to forward ports to. I have updated all of the drivers per WoW tech support. I tried disabling the McAfee firewall and just using the Netgear hardware firewall. Regardless of what I have tried, I get the exact same result.

Last night I decided to run a speed test shortly after I logged off of WoW to see what my bandwidth was. The speed test registered me at less than dial up. I am using DSL which is supposedly 1.5 x 256 best effort. I know WoW does not need that much bandwidth and this is more of a response time issue but the test made me wonder if a rogue application was running in the background. I checked ctr-alt-del but I did not see any processes that looked unusual. I did see that WoW causes the PC to run at 100% but that is normal from past experience.

I also have WoW on a different computer with the following spec:

P4 1.3 gHz with 768Kb of Ram
128MB Video Card (Can't remember model NVIDIA maybe)
Windows XP
Dell Desktop
McAfee Firewall
Netgear Router

The game seems to run decently on the above PC. The latency stays below 300 which is still green. One difference between the two set-ups is the notebook has a newer version of McAfee. Another point of interest is that I did not configure the Netgear router to port forward to the desktop and it still worked ok.

After all the fussing with the notebook, I am now fairly convinced that there is some kind of rogue application running in the background that I can't identify. It might even be Blizzard running their Warden program which helps stop cheaters. My questions are:

1. Do you agree with my assessment?
2. How do I identify the rogue application?
3. How do I get rid of the appliaction?
4. Are there any "safe" programs which can tell me if I am connecting to other pcs or if any pcs are connecting to me behind the scenes?
5. What else could it be?

Many thanks for any advice, Bill

 

[BadThad]

Internet game play is highly dependent on routing. I'd run a trace route to the server well before troubleshooting the PC. Nonetheless, a 200-300 ms ping is horrible for gaming!

 

[imported_LandShark]

is WOW the only application, which requires internet, running?

are you sure there is no one else using the internet?

are you downloading with BT? uploading?

 

[Abel007]

WoW servers SUCK. Thats the problem.

 

[bpatters69]

Thanks for all of the replies. I did run tracert back to one of WoW server's per their instructions and the ping times seemed reasonable. I think there were about 8 hops and each hop was about 100ms. I am going from memory so I might be off.

I ended up reinstalling the game last night...along with all the updates. I have not had a chance to check it out yet.

If there are any other ideas, please let 'em fly.

Bill

 

[bpatters69]

Originally posted by: Abel007
WoW servers SUCK. Thats the problem.

I keep asking their tech, "Nothing has changed on my side yet the latency since the last patch had been horrible. Why is that?"

His answers are probably:

1. Our servers do suck
2. We have loaded up with so many new players that our servers are maxed out

BTW, for those who play, the servers have been started and restarted a bunch of times lately.

 

[bpatters69]

Bump.....

 

[imported_LandShark]

you didnt answer my questions

 

[bpatters69]

Originally posted by: LandShark
is WOW the only application, which requires internet, running?

are you sure there is no one else using the internet?

are you downloading with BT? uploading?

Sorry about that:

1. WoW is the only application running which requires Internet
2. I am sure no one else is using the Internet. I have checked my router to see which devices are connected
3. I am not downloading or uploading.

Just an update. I did a horough and I mean thorough spyware/malware/virus check of the machine and it is now clean as a whistle. I did not find any viruses but there was some spyware which I have removed. WoW does seem to run better but I still get the high latency but the latency is not as bad (still red though) and does get better after a few minutes. I am no IT expert but my guess is the spyware was causing problems but I now think the WoW servers are overloaded and or not matained correctly.

 

[imported_LandShark]

update windows with all existing patches

try another computer with the same router. or take your computer to a friend's house to check if your computer is the problem

 

[bpatters69]

As I said in the OP..... ;-)

I did run the game on my desktop PC and it seemed to run ok. I have spent the past two days removing spyware/malware, etc and the game runs better but not great.

 

[Kwaipie]

Are you running CTMod or CTRaid? How long does it take to enter an instance or the subway now?

 

[WookE]

bpatters69

Absolutely first thing I would do is direct connect to the modem test.
you mention something about this in your original post but if at this point you still get the same results the t/s steps begin with everything from the wall.
1. new cable
2. try an alternate dsl adapter
3. verify in your network settings no other LAN is setup...IE onboard vs NIC no internet sharing or bridged TCP/IP
4. kill McAffee AntiVirus. Some antivirus programs will attempt to scan all data to and from the PC. Kill your Windows Firewall service. Don't disable it at the TCP/IP go to manage services and stop it.
5. If you are trying to find a rogue program run everest home edition scan and post the results or just google each process running to determine if its malware or required system processes.
6. go to task manager and click performance.. your peak memory should never excede physical memory....also just in case make sure you bump up your virtual memory or enable this if you have not already.
7. Finally if your still having issues I would format a new drive and dedicate this to WoW.
SATA is good and get a raptor if you want the best.

hope this helps.

Wooke